January 11, 2015

Notes on other books I read over the summer holiday

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie: Sci-fi novel in the space opera tradition which swept all the major sci-fi awards last year and is, I think, the first book to do so. All the critics are comparing her to Ian M Banks, or ‘the successor to Banks’, and that’s fair enough, but I also think there’s a lot of Ursula Le Guin’s influence in there (most of the characters are members of an ungendered humanoid race). Highly recommended. My only criticism is that in sci-fi/fantasy books with exotic character names I find it really hard to keep track of everyone.

American Prometheus by Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird: A biography of Robert Oppenheimer. The science writing isn’t as good as I’d like. (The gold standard of science biographies is, for me, James Glieck’s book about Feynman). If you don’t already know a lot about quantum physics then the story of Oppenheimer’s contributions to it won’t mean much. The sections on Los Alamos are excellent. I’ve wanted to read a good nonfiction account of the Manhattan Project for a long time and this was it. Oppenheimer was under FBI surveillance for much of his adult life, and his biographers had access to the FBI archives, so the level of insight they have into their subject is almost unprecedented. This could be an unexpected side-effect of the modern surveillance state: our ancestors will get really kick-ass biographies.

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson: My wife enjoyed it. I started but didn’t finish it. I didn’t like Atkinson’s superior, sneering attitude towards her characters, which the reader is supposed to share. Also I’m really sick of British writers writing about World War II.

Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle: Not for everyone but I loved it. NYT review here. If you describe the book in terms of plot it sounds banal and weird, but it’s an example of how clever story-telling and great prose can transform something simple into something dark and complex and brilliant.

The Adversary by Emmanuel Carrère: Carrère wrote a biography of Phillip K Dick called I am alive and you are dead. It’s my favorite literary biography; I’ve reread it a few times and always felt bad for the author that this book wasn’t better known, and that he hadn’t made it as a writer (because if he’d published more books I would have heard of them, right?) Then I stumbled across this Paris Review interview with Carrère and learned that he’s one of the superstars of contemporary French literature. (I assumed he was a Hispanic writer working in the US.) Anyway, The Adversary is his best-selling true crime novel. It is amazing. I’m going to read everything else he’s written.

Impressive. But at the risk of being accused of hubris, I can trump that, having spent a sizeable portion of my vacation (to the chagrin of my wife and young, attention-hungry children) working on a jigsaw.

I commenced on Christmas day, and can now announce it completed.

I believe I’ve accomplished this in record time, because it said ‘Three to five years’ on the box.

I’ve read about the first third of the Rhodes book, years ago, and thought it was great, but then it got bogged down in detail. Someone wrote a letter, someone requested funds, someone petitioned someone else, and I just lost interest. I should pick it up again.

Wolf in White Van really is astoundingly well-written – there are so many phrases and passages worth highlighting for later reference. I have an aversion to writing in books though, so had to find this one online:

“Normal adult shopping is something I will never actually do, because it’s no more possible for me to go shopping like normal adults do than it is for a man with no legs to wake up one day and walk. I can’t miss shopping like you’d miss things you once had. I miss it in a different way. I miss it like you would miss a train.”